There was a wry hint of irony in defense budget expert Todd Harrison’s voice Friday, when he noted that President Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget would be released on Groundhog Day.
“Here we go again,” said Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis.
Obama will request $535 billion in baseline spending for the Defense Department next year and another $50 billion in overseas contingency funding, if the numbers are in line with the figures that have leaked out over the past week.
Baseline funding above $499 billion would trigger automatic sequester cuts unless Congress passes a bill to raise the cap. The $35 billion extra in the president’s request is likely a non-starter, and the $50 billion in contingency funds is likely to concern fiscal conservatives.
The new budget chairmen in Congress would need to lead an effort, and get the Republican majority leadership bought in, just to make some slight adjustments to the cap. But early indications show that new House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., has little appetite for raising the caps. At a Heritage Foundation speech in mid-January, his first as the new chairman, Price indicated his committee would produce its own budget guidance by March, one that would try to normalize the budget process and get it into balance — with entitlement spending such as Medicare and Social Security in his sights. That could mean a long session and negotiations well past the Oct. 1 funding deadline, again.
“I don’t think DOD is going to get anywhere close to what they are planning right now,” Harrison said.
The Pentagon is expect to push shutting down some weapons systems, such as the A-10 Thunderbolt, and ask to conduct another base closure round, which are both unlikely to find support in Congress. The Pentagon may recommend further cuts to troop strength — but that’s not likely to gain traction, either, given the current demands on the military.
The Department of Defense is not expected to request any further adjustments to pay or benefits until the Pentagon and Congress have time to absorb recommendations announced Thursday by a commission tasked to find ways to reform the military’s retirement and benefits systems.
Last, expect the president’s budget to include funding for a host of big-ticket items, including a new bomber, a new ballistic submarine, a new fighter and new satellite systems.
Then, there’s the overseas contingency operations (OCO) fund, which was originally intended to fund war operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but now funds much more than that. It is a separate fund from the baseline and can grow without triggering spending caps as long as there is political will to spend the money. OCO spending was around long before Operation Enduring Freedom began in October 2001 but was previously known as supplemental funding, such as President Clinton’s request for $4 billion in supplemental funding for operations in Kosovo in 1994.
For the last 14 years, however, contingency spending has continued even as combat operations ceased and evolved to fund functions both tangential and unrelated to the war.
For example, OCO spending increased last year to respond to Russia’s aggression in the Ukraine and the violent and rapid mobilization is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. But last year’s money also was used, among other items, to fund a drug interdiction program in South America, to fund the the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, and to procure millions of dollars in missiles and ammunition, military satellite communications and even a snow plow.
As budget negotiations move forward, based on previous year OCO funding, not all non-related programs in the request will get full funding but almost all will get some, even as new, unexpected crises emerge. Using the fund is a safer route to get programs money in an austere fiscal environment and part of the reason the fund is so resistant to being folded back into the base budget.
Based on the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis’s analysis, even the amount of OCO spending specified just for Afghanistan operations has skyrocketed since sequestration took effect while the number of troops there has fallen.
Before sequestration, from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2013, spending remained level at or slightly above $1.2 million per soldier per year deployed in Afghanistan. That included the 2009 surge, when 30,000 additional troops poured into the country and the Pentagon shipped thousands of new up-armored vehicles there to better protect troops from roadside bombs.
In fiscal 2014, the first year to absorb sequester hits, spending jumped to about $2.25 million per soldier per year, then soared in fiscal 2015 to more than $4.5 million per soldier per year. In 2016, based on the center’s assumption that the funding request for OCO money for Afghanistan will be about $42 billion, the group estimates it will cost about $3.75 million per soldier per year.
“It’s funding that appears to be in excess of the need,” Harrison said.
In previous Defense Department budget documents, the agency has noted that the Afghanistan funds also cover related operations in the Persian Gulf and to support non-related missions, such as counter-terrorism missions in the Horn of Africa and the Philippines, so it is not a straight equation of spending divided by the number troops.
In addition, a Pentagon spokesman said Friday, spending per soldier may be rising because as troops draw down, the fixed costs for operations in Afghanistan rise per soldier.
